Sida Liu and Gihad Nasr on The City and the North: Canada in the Chicago School of Sociology (The American Sociologist)

"The City and the North: Canada in the Chicago School of Sociology"
Sida Liu, Gihad Nasr
The American Sociologist
Published online: June 2025

Abstract: This article explores the intertwined histories of the Chicago School of sociology and Canadian sociology, challenging the conventional view that the Chicago School’s development was confined to the city of Chicago. By examining the academic journeys of prominent Canadian scholars such as Annie Marion MacLean, Roderick McKenzie, Helen and Everett Hughes, and Erving Goffman, it illustrates how their contributions were instrumental in shaping both the Chicago School and Canadian sociology. This research, based on extensive archival materials from primary and secondary sources, suggests that the continuous mobility and interaction of scholars between Chicago and Canada played an important role in the historical evolution of sociological thought. The study aims to “decenter” the Chicago School by highlighting the significant yet often overlooked contributions of Canadian sociologists, thereby providing a new understanding of its legacy and global impact.

Julius Yam and Cora Chan on Oratorical leadership of chief justices in post-handover Hong Kong (ICON)

"Oratorical leadership of chief justices in post-handover Hong Kong"
Julius Yam, Cora Chan
International Journal of Constitutional Law
Published online: May 2025

Abstract: This article examines how Hong Kong’s three post-handover chief justices—Andrew Li, Geoffrey Ma, and Andrew Cheung—have responded to constitutional and political challenges through their public speeches, statements, and interviews. It observes that Li adopted a bold and proactive approach that connected Hong Kong’s legal system with the wider common law world, while Ma sought greater engagement with the general public on rule-of-law issues. Cheung’s approach, in contrast, has thus far been more conciliatory and circumspect than that of his predecessors. Despite the differing leadership styles adopted by the three chief justices and the distinct nature of the challenges they have faced, the task for all three has been to find an equilibrium between liberal and authoritarian ideologies that sustains Hong Kong’s common law legal system without compromising Chinese sovereignty, and an element of pragmatism underlies all three leaders’ oratory approaches.

Technology in the Courtroom (John Liu Profiled in HKU Bulletin)

"Technology in the Courtroom"
John Liu
HKU Bulletin
Published in May 2025

How do live broadcasts affect behaviour in the courtroom? What happens when judges use AI? And what can data analytics tell us about the factors that favour litigants in court? Professor John Liu has been investigating.

Live broadcasts of court proceedings have become more common around the world, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, they are also part of an effort to encourage judicial transparency.

But sentiment about such broadcasts is divided. Some fear that judges and lawyers play to the cameras and that decisions will be badly affected. Others fear that all parties involved will be very nervous with livestreaming. In the US, David Souter, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, once famously said “the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it’s going to roll over my dead body.”

Professor John Liu in the Faculty of Law, however, has been sceptical about such risks, which he calls ‘folklore’. Recently, he decided to test the matter in a randomised control trial involving 85 cases in China, including civil, criminal and administrative (suing the government) cases. Some cases were assigned to be broadcast live and all participants in the trials were told of this; the others were not broadcast. The language and behaviours of everyone involved were analysed using a combination of AI audio recognition tools and manual review.

“What we found out is that some of the folklore is just not true. Judges and lawyers do not play to the cameras or change their behaviour. These repeat players are not influenced or affected in a bad way by live streaming,” he said.

“On the other hand, the parties – the litigants – are somewhat influenced. They appear to be nervous, and they speak at a slow speed and convey less information in trials that are broadcast live.”

Detecting trends

While this may affect litigants’ perceptions of the judicial process – a matter that still needs to be studied more closely – Professor Liu said it demonstrates that judges may be too conservative about the risks of a tool that enhances transparency in the courtroom......

Click here to read the full text.

New book by Shiling Xiao on Judicial Review in Greater China (Routledge)

Judicial Review in Greater China: Activism and Deference of Four Apex Courts
Shiling Xiao (PhD Graduate)
Routledge
Published in June 2025
260 pp.

Description: This book examines the judicial review systems in the four areas of Greater China – China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau – and uncovers judicial review activities of the apex courts of each region. It provides a comparative assessment of judicial activism and deference. The development of modern judicial review is one of the key elements of the twentieth century’s legal heritage. By enforcing the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, and human rights protection, many courts have been vested with unprecedented powers and have played an essential role in supervising the exercise of government power through constitutional and administrative review. This work investigates the most up-to-date aspects of judicial review in Greater China and reflects on the modern theory regarding the judicialization of politics in different political regimes: democratic, authoritarian, and hybrid. The volume collects all substantive judicial review decisions delivered in the past twenty years by the four apex courts: the China’s Supreme People’s Court, the Taiwan Constitutional Court, the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong, and the Court of Final Appeal of Macau. This comprehensive dataset includes some 800 judicial review decisions, presenting a comprehensive resource of fundamental baseline data for evaluating judicial review in Greater China. The book will be an invaluable companion for scholars and researchers working in the areas of Comparative Public Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, Constitutional Politics, and Asian Studies.

Seung Mann BAE on The Nature of Plurality Decisions: A Theoretical Reassessment (2025 Junior Scholars Conference)

Between the 25th-26th of April, 2025, Seung Mann (Kevin) BAE, a year 1 PhD student of HKU Law, presented his working paper, titled “The Nature of Plurality Decisions: A Theoretical Reassessment,” at the 11th Annual Junior Scholars Conference (2025 Junior Scholars Conference). The Conference, hosted by the University of Michigan Law School, offers junior scholars (PhD/SJD/JSD students and candidates, postdoctoral fellows, assistant professors, and associate professors) from institutions around the world a platform to present and discuss their work with peers and receive feedback from faculty members of Michigan Law. In this year of the Conference, Kevin presented alongside scholars from the US, the UK, Canada, and Switzerland. The paper Kevin presented is part of his broader PhD research on the dynamics of agreement and disagreement in judicial decision-making, and it specifically focused on plurality decisions, or what he alternatively refers to as the phenomenon of multiple majority opinion judgments, as an instance of extreme judicial dissensus. The paper itself sought to conduct an original reassessment of the current law in the US regarding the interpretation of plurality decisions as laid down by the Supreme Court decision of Marks v United States 430 U.S. 188 (1977). Kevin argues against the incumbent doctrinal understanding of plurality decisions to be structurally impossible and fictitious when accounting for the genuine fractious dynamics of multiple majority opinion judgments. Instead, he reconciles the substance of such decisions as a matter of super-dicta to explain its normative force upon subsequent courts and address its Rule of Law concerns.

Weixia Gu comments on the establishment of the International Organization for Mediation

"Hong Kong hits a high with global legal body, but now comes the hard part"
Jess Ma, Jeffie Lam, Harvey Kong
South China Morning Post
31 May 2025

Hong Kong made a groundbreaking move on Friday (30 May 2025) when it became the headquarters for a new intergovernmental mediation body but the unit’s real tests will be in the types of substantive cases it handles and whether more countries will join the convention, experts have said.

While the China-led International Organisation for Mediation launched on Friday with 33 signatories, and the conspicuous absence of major Western countries, leading lawyers said they expected more nations would join once the body’s work was promoted.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was front and centre at a high-level ceremony for countries to formally sign as founding members of the organisation…

Asked about the participating countries, former justice minister Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah stressed that each one was an equal entity that should not be judged as “big or small”…

Hong Kong’s traditional rival Singapore had earlier spearheaded the formation of the Singapore Convention on Mediation, a treaty which came into force in 2020 and governs the enforcement of mediation outcomes in international commercial disputes.

The two world superpowers – China and the United States – were among the 46 nations that signed the multilateral treaty in 2019, alongside countries such as Britain, Japan and Australia.

Gu Weixia, an associate professor of the University of Hong Kong’s law faculty, said that the Singapore convention was a treaty led by the UN Commission on International Trade Law and acted as an enforcement tool for mediation outcomes.

“Its scope of application is comparatively restrictive,” she explained.

“It only targets international commercial mediation, and it only affects enforcement [of mediation settlement agreements].”

Gu, a dispute resolution specialist, also highlighted that more than 40 countries had signed the treaty, but only 18 had ratified it. Singapore and Japan are the only developed nations to have ratified the convention.

She said the International Organisation for Mediation has a wider scope of application, including interstate and investor-state disputes. It also offers additional options for legal services in the city.

“Most international legal capitals are in the West, such as The Hague, Geneva, New York and Washington,” Gu said. “The International Organisation for Mediation established in Hong Kong is a big booster for the city’s status in international law.”

Click here to read the full text on SCMP website.

Dr Alex Huang won Gold Medal in International Insolvency Institute 2025 Prize in International Insolvency Studies

Congratulations to our Global Academic Fellow, Dr Alex Huang, whose submitted paper The Doctrinal Evolution of Bankruptcy Law was awarded the Gold Medal in International Insolvency Institute (III) 2025 Prize in International Insolvency Studies.

Dr. Alex Huang applies network analysis and natural language processing to a dataset of 6,500 bankruptcy opinions issued between 1982 and 2017. His study traces a doctrinal shift in the relationship between two sets of rules: distributional rules, which determine the priority and payoff of creditors, and operational rules, which aim to preserve or enhance firm value through business operations. Although the U.S. Bankruptcy Code itself has remained largely intact, the relationship between these two types of rules has changed dramatically over the past three decades—shifting from unbundling to bundling. This work reveals a profound evolution in the practice of corporate reorganization.

The International Insolvency Institute is a non-profit, limited-membership organization dedicated to advancing and promoting insolvency as a respected discipline in the international field. Its primary objectives include improving international co-operation in the insolvency area and achieving greater coordination among nations in multinational business reorganizations and restructurings. The III Prize is awarded for original legal research, commentary or analysis on topics of international insolvency and restructuring significance and on comparative international analysis of domestic insolvency and restructuring issues and developments. The Prize Competition is open to full and part-time undergraduate and graduate students and to practitioners in practice for nine years or less.

Past recipients of the III Prize include leading scholars in the field of insolvency law, among them Professor Irit Ronen-Mevorach of Warwick Law School and Professor John Pottow of the University of Michigan.

Lusina Ho and Hui Jing on The Dominance of Regulatory Oversight in Chinese Investment Trusts (Asia-Pacific Trusts Law, Volume 3)

"The Dominance of Regulatory Oversight in Chinese Investment Trusts"
Lusina Ho and Hui Jing
Asia-Pacific Trusts Law, Volume 3, Boundaries in Context, Part II, Chapter 10
Hart Publishing
Published online: May 2025

Abstract: A fundamental tenet in the relationship between regulations and private law is their functional dichotomy. Private law deals with the adjudication of bilateral rights and duties between individuals. Its main purpose is to protect the rights of individuals from infringement by others. In contrast, regulations primarily serve public interests, and are typically enforced by regulatory agencies through administrative sanctions or criminal liability. In this chapter, we argue that the Chinese legal regime for investment trusts departs from this paradigmatic dichotomy. Regulatory supervision not only addresses public interest concerns, but also frequently displaces private law in resolving disputes amongst trust parties, blurring the boundary between private law and regulations. We examine the unique circumstances in China that account for this regulatory dominance and argue that it can be justified only as a temporary measure.

Following this introduction, Part II discusses the main reason for regulatory dominance in China. We examine how the widespread use of investment trusts for shadow banking raises public interest concerns when private law rights are enforced in such trusts. In Part III, we explore the use and limitations of regulatory supervision to address both the public interest and private law concerns raised by trust (mal)practice. Part IV contends that whilst regulations can be an effective interim measure for addressing private law disputes, legislators should in the long term adopt a proactive approach and enact trust laws that clearly define the rights and responsibilities of the trust parties. Part V concludes.

Full text of this chapter is available on SSRN, please click here.

Kelvin Low and Peter Watts on The Case for Cryptoassets as Property (New book chapter)

"The Case for Cryptoassets as Property"
Peter Watts, Kelvin Low
in Law at the Cutting Edge: Essays in Honour of Sarah Worthington, edited by Sinéad Agnew and Marcus Smith (Bloomsbury Publishing, April 2024), Chapter 14, pp. 281 - 299

Abstract: Cryptoassets, introduced in the wake of the Great Recession (2007-2009), have proven to be very divisive. Embraced by some as part of a revolutionary future, they are derided by others as the misconceived fever dream of naïve technologists who don’t understand how the real world works. Despite a recent meltdown in the cryptoasset markets, or perhaps because of it, the courts will increasingly have to resolve disputes over cryptoassets. An important question that has dramatic implications on how such disputes are resolved is, “Should cryptoassets be considered property?” In this bifurcated contribution, two contrasting positions are taken. “The Case for Cryptoassets as Property” presents the case for classifying cryptoassets as property, arguing that it greatly simplifies dispute resolution. “Better Left to the Legislature?”, on the other hand, disputes the capacity of the courts to do so. It is our shared hope that, through this adversarial process, we shine a clearer light on the arguments that judges and other lawmakers ought to consider as they face the coming deluge of disputes.

Please click here to read the book chapter on SSRN.